Loren Steffy: Labor talks at United are up in the air

CommentaryLabor talks at United in a stall

LOREN STEFFY, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Published 5:30 am, Monday, July 4, 2011

Wednesday morning, I was sitting aboard a Continental Airlines 737 at New York's LaGuardia airport waiting and waiting for things to move forward. Finally, the plane began to accelerate down the runway, only to stop abruptly, turn around and wait some more before trying again.

It's a fitting analogy for the state of labor negotiations as the new United Airlines tries to hammer out agreements with its varied unions.

Talks aimed at combining the unions under new contracts have progressed like New York departures in summertime — behind schedule and with few signs of moving forward. Labor issues have undermined many an airline merger, and the stalled status of talks at United raises questions about how smoothly its merger with Continental is progressing.

Slow progress with pilots

Even more surprising, management remains far apart in discussions with its pilots, one of the few employee groups represented by the same union.

"We're not making the progress that I'd like to see," said Capt. Jay Pierce, head of the Continental chapter of the Air Line Pilots Association. "We're in the doldrums on some scheduling issues."

Clearly, management hoped to have a collective agreement in place by now. Yet after almost a year of negotiations, the two sides remain vastly far apart on economic issues. The last proposals submitted by each side differed by about $1.3 billion a year, according to a United website devoted to the negotiations.

United doesn't need a single collective bargaining agreement to operate as a single airline, but its skies aren't likely to be very friendly if it doesn't. Part of the merger's challenge was to spread Continental's relatively good labor relations throughout the combined airline, rather than allowing United's long-standing labor acrimony to prevail.

Grievances filed

Last month, the Continental pilots filed two grievances over United's plans to sell Continental aircraft and move flying assignments before the new contract is in place.

In a recent letter to members, Pierce said he also is concerned about staffing.

"The sad truth is that we are a woefully understaffed airline," he wrote. He said pilots are being pushed into more flying time with less rest.

Continental has always gotten high productivity from its pilots, and summer is the busiest flying time of the year, but Pierce told me pilots are now flying an average approaching 90 hours a month, compared with closer to 80 hours before the merger.

"We're starting to see a situation this summer that's concerning to us," he said. "We're starting to push our guys a little too hard."

Pierce blames the increase on United's efforts to better align aircraft and routes, even as it operates United and Continental as separate subsidiaries.

Such "fleet rational-ization" was a key cost-saving goal of the merger. But not all pilots are certified to fly all planes, and the unions can't combine workforces and seniority lists until they have a single contract.

"They're trying to take advantage of the future before they have taken all the proper steps," Pierce said.

Airline labor negotiations tend to be ugly things, conducted through a messy and very public back-and-forth. It's a model of dispute resolution that falls somewhere between The SandlotandLord of the Flies.

United, for its part, argues it wants to get a collective bargaining agreement done quickly, but it's not willing to sacrifice profitability to please pilots, nor will it accept a deal that's not competitive with other carriers.

"We can't, and won't, write a check that can't be cashed," it said on the website.

This could be dismissed as typical labor-management posturing if an agreement weren't so vital to the merger's success. Already, there's enough friction to dismiss any notion that this deal will resemble the smooth labor negotiations that accompanied the Delta Air Lines-Northwest Airlines merger.

Instead, United's stalled labor talks raise the question of whether the entire merger is stuck on the tarmac.